This thesis examines the politics of knowledge in the field of critical education in a context of neoliberal policies as informed by a case in Latin America. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork with a narrative approach, I explore curriculum policies as meaning-making processes as enacted by the teachers of Alma House School, a subsidized private primary school located in the southern area of Santiago, Chile. I argue that ways of knowing are deployed through practices of meaning-making that allow ways of engagement and being in the world interrupting and challenging the dominant ones. Through this, I analyse the limits and possibilities to produce a politics of knowing from counterhegemonic practices of meaning-making. Rather than considering teachers and school staff as mere implementers of the curriculum, I specifically explore how their engagement with education from a community standpoint contributes to the production of knowledge more complex and relevant about the social world they inhabit and its relationship with it. Adding to critical studies that have explored the processes of meaning-making in teaching and learning, as well as the adoption of educational policies across different countries, I employ and extend the policy translation approach to examine how the national curriculum is critically translated and contested by those responsible for teachers and staff in a community-based school. I show how the school can develop critical pedagogy practices through the production of memories and carnival, which allow them to maintain a connection with their community and history, and thus actualise their purpose of educational justice. The formal nature of the school creates tensions, which are analysed in this thesis.
Education and the politics of knowing in a community-based school: An ethnographic study in a deprived local area in Santiago, Chile.
Foster Tejero, B. M. (Author). 3 Oct 2023
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)